Raiders Lost The Arc

Raiders Lost The Arc

Old Bangaloreans rage against the new IT bratpack, blaming them for all that's gone wrong with the city

SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU, Outlook

Techies Are Blamed For

* Land-grabbing, zooming property and rental rates, the rising cost of living
* Creating traffic jams, pollution, encroachments
* Turning 'garden city' into 'garbage city', pensioner's paradise to 'suicide capital'
* Devaluing other professions
* Destroying intellectual and artistic culture
* Introducing a culture of conspicuous consumption in malls and bars

***
Techies Complain

* City's problems caused by poor urban planning and management
* Of increasingly becoming target of crime and assault
* Of being insulted routinely, cheated, and overcharged by the locals

***

"Bangalore, a city whose soul has been clinically removed in the name of corporate efficiency.... Everything about the host culture has been watered down, Westernised, or otherwise screwed up...."

Author and actor Adam Russ is not the only one to have directed his caustic ire at Bangalore in the anti-traveller companion he called 101 Places Not to Visit: Your Essential Guide to the World's Most Miserable, Ugly, Boring and Inbred Destinations. But while he named no names, Bangaloreans themselves have found the villains of this piece: those magnificent men with their modern machines, the IT professionals.

A class of people that just the other day was being congratulated for putting the city and the state on the international map, for generating loads of employment, and for making millionaires out of ordinary men, is now increasingly being accused of turning the garden city into garbage city, a pensioner's paradise into the suicide capital.


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The world's most celebrated IT city is now considering that privilege to be a curse. Infosys and Wipro are no longer considered gateways to heaven, but more as roads to hell. When Infosys's Narayana Murthy was charged with showing 'disrespect' to the national anthem, there was a glaring absence of sympathy for the IT czar in the public domain, whereas earlier there would have been a tidal wave of support. Likewise for Wipro, when it was charged by a government panel of encroaching upon Bellandur lake to build its guest house. Another time, when the state government proposed to set up an education training and management institute with the Azim Premji Foundation, there was a letter campaign against it. There is now a perceptible change in the way the public in Bangalore looks at Murthy and Premji, the two most revered symbols of its IT industry—that they're no different from other businessmen who merely make profits for their company and their shareholders.

Evidence of Bangalore's total disenchantment with all things infotech came also at the Karnataka state awards this year. In the list of 51 eminent people chosen for the awards, there were professors, artistes, doctors, lawyers, businessmen and scientists, but—unlike in the past few years—no one from the IT domain. Attend a wedding, a birthday party, or a housewarming ceremony in Bangalore these days, and chances are that the conversation will inevitably veer around to IT-bashing. This tendency to lapse into IT-bashing turned literal when five IT professionals out on a post-dinner stroll around their home in the ITPL area were abused and beaten up without provocation about a month ago. The assailants didn't rob them, just kept hitting them saying, 'you IT guys'.Joint commissioner (crime) Gopal Hosur points to nearly 643 cases of crime against IT folk under various sections of the ipc since 2004 in the city.


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Many prominent Bangaloreans admit to this rising antipathy against the techie. "There is certainly a growing sense of alienation, of resentment, among people from the non-IT professional class," says Ramesh Ramanathan, a former top executive at Citibank and founder of civic initiative Janaagraha. "The resentment against IT people unfortunately includes those in the government too," adds Ravichander, former member of the now-defunct Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), which was chaired by Infosys boss Nandan Nilekani.

One of the major charges against the IT class is that it is responsible for pushing up land prices in and around Bangalore. Building a house on a 30x40 plot was always a middle-class dream. The IT influx has now rendered it unaffordable. Dr Solly Benjamin, an urban expert who has advised the World Bank and UNDP, enumerates the kinds of fear that now haunt the traditional middle class: "The fear of not being able to register your small plot, the fear of being forced to pay huge amounts for water, and worse, fear of your land being acquired for an IT corridor." Not to forget land acquisitions happening for the Metro rail, the six-lane highway leading to the new international airport and for the many new ring and other roads.

Not only have rental rates zoomed in Bangalore, flats too are now priced keeping IT salaries in mind. Jackbastian Nazareth, executive director of Sobha Developers, one of the biggest builders in the city, says that about 60 per cent of the houses they build are picked up by IT people. Another big builder, Mantri Developers, too lets on that more than 40 per cent of their houses are bought by the young techie crowd.

Blaming them for the overall rise in the cost of living in Bangalore, old Bangaloreans also gripe that IT-wallahs get preferential treatment in banks, hotels, malls or holiday packages. To them, it seems, as though everything in their old, familiar city is suddenly being structured to meet the demands of the techies.


Conspicuous, all-consuming: Neon-lit Brigade Road

It is unfair, they say, that the very people who have 'messed up' the city should be pandered to. The coming of IT professionals and the flooding of streets with 'their cars', they feel, has badly jolted the serene construct of a city that in the minds of the traditional middle class took decades to build. Tree-lined avenues are now a thing of the past, because they have made way for roads being broadened to accommodate the city's growing traffic. The commute between home and office is going the Mumbai way. In fact, that is exactly what Bangaloreans fear: that Bangalore is fast becoming, or has already become, another Mumbai.

The physical assault apart, the middle class also thinks the techies have upturned their moral cosmos, their language and culture. Bars and restaurants, they feel, proliferated ever since they came to town. More and more people eat out and consume alcohol, making a mockery of the traditional thrift of the middle class. Last New Year's eve, the offtake of rum, whisky, wine, beer (what the excise department terms as Indian-made foreign liquor) from the excise department's bonded warehouse in Bangalore alone was to the tune of Rs 15 crore. This from Bangalore alone; the rest of the state accounted for Rs 10 crore. "From a culture of simple living to a culture of conspicuous consumption, the city has been transformed," remarks former ambassador to UNESCO and the state's top bureaucrat Chiranjiv Singh.

Socially as well, Bangalore's traditional middle class feels upstaged by the IT bratpack. Till the last arrived, they were the kings. Huge in numbers, drawn from the dozen-or-so public sector units, the thousands of educational institutions, or part of the large communities of doctors, lawyers and government officials, the old middle class dominated Bangalore for decades. When the IT revolution hit Bangalore, some of their successive generations did jump on to the IT bandwagon, but a huge chunk largely remained excluded from the tech boom.


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The attention lavished on IT, goes the feeling, diminished the dignity of every other profession (see column by C. N.R. Rao, pg 108). Often it manifests itself within a single family, where one of the sons or daughters has taken up an IT job and the other is an officer in the government or a professor in a college. Though level on aspiration, the disparity in incomes creates potential conflict situations.

Even in the marriage market, parents prefer an IT groom than a government-employed boy for their daughter. "IT grooms are regarded as hotter than anybody else. I have a personal experience," says PR professional V. Anand. Adds Chiranjiv Singh, "Two friends who were looking for matches for their daughters told me they did not want IT grooms for different reasons. One talked of the unconventional morals of IT boys and others said highly-paid IT boys were often from family backgrounds that did not match their salary levels." But, he goes on to nuance the argument, "This snobbery is paradoxical. What is not desirable in a son-in-law is desirable in a son."

To the earlier dividing lines of the city and the cantonment, the native and the colonial, the courtly and the democratic, says Chiranjiv Singh, has been added one of the IT people and the non-IT people. It's reflected in various ways, including in language. The renaming of Bangalore to Bengaluru was largely a reaction to English becoming the preferred lingua franca over Kannada.


Choked road: A traffic jam near Electronic City

Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy has an almost elegaic strand to his lament on the state of Bangalore. "Bangalore is no longer a safe and comfortable city for children and old people," he says. "It is almost impossible to cross the roads. When you build a city, you must think of the old and the very young. It cannot be a city only for the youth. The city has no sense of itself any longer. The older professionals are rooted in the city. The new professionals are not rooted and they do not feel like putting down roots here because there are so many uncertainties. The IT people suffer from an illusion that they are doing well in life and doing good for the city."

The question Bangaloreans are increasingly asking is: should we allow a tiny population of IT professionals, who make 'exaggerated' claims about their number and contribution, to control the city? The city's population is well over 60 lakh now, the claim is people who directly benefit out of the IT industry is about 12 to 15 per cent of the population. But, maintains Dr Solly Benjamin, "The formal IT types are over-represented in the way data is counted. There is enough official data to show that the southwest and northwest part of the city constitute the major employment economy, but these areas have less than a third of the infrastructure. The point is that Bangalore is also Sivajinagar, City Market area, Magadi Road and Mysore Road."

Dr Lalitha Kamath of urban policy body Cassum elaborates: "The IT sector accounts for only a small part of the economy and employment.Yet it dominates in terms of media coverage, in preferential government policies, in the imaginations of people as contributing to a world-class city."

So much for the prosecution's case. Prof A.R. Vasavi of the city's National Institute for Advanced Studies sets up a few arguments for the defence of the much-maligned IT janata. "IT people should also be seen as victims of the larger global industry that extorts their labour on the basis of time and cost differences," he says. "In addition, the poor infrastructure and competitive work contexts add pressures to their daily and general work and social lives. Their lives are hard and they're paying for it with high stress levels. The unfortunate part is that despite the anticipated boom, the city continues to lack effective management."

The techies themselves complain—and perhaps with some justification—that the city's shopkeepers and vendors routinely rip them off and overcharge them. Endorsement of this comes from none other than Infosys Foundation chairperson Sudha Murthy who in an autobiographical essay titled 'The IT Divide' recounts a telling episode of how she watched an IT executive wearing a shirt with his company logo being charged 30 per cent more than others for fruit and flowers. When she remonstrated with the vendor, he shot back, "You keep quiet. Can't you see he works for a software company? They can afford any price and don't bargain." It's a typical example of the kind of daily aggravation IT professionals face in Bangalore.

Why, then, are they so misunderstood? Says Subroto Bagchi, coo of MindTree Consulting (see column): "The geeks have failed to communicate. They have remained isolated from the larger social system." Ramesh Ramanathan too agrees that IT people have been sticking to their "insulated communities" both professionally and culturally. "It's very important that they discover the other facets of the city, and make an attempt to get absorbed into it," he says. Should they succeed at this, Adam Russ, hopefully, will have to eat his words.